Call for Papers

The 15th International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Law (ICAIL 2015) will be held at the University of San Diego School of Law from Monday, June 8 to Friday, June 12, 2015.

The conference will feature a main track for technical papers, a demonstration track, workshops, tutorials, continuing legal education sessions, a doctoral consortium and best paper prizes. Details about tracks still open for submissions, the topics of relevance to the conference, and instructions for submitting papers are given below.

The deadline for submitting conference papers, demos, and for the doctoral consortium has now passed. Some individual workshops may still be accepting papers. See Workshops for more information.

Artificial Intelligence and Law is a vibrant research field that focuses on:

Legal reasoning and development of computational methods of such reasoning

Applications of AI and other advanced information technologies to support the legal domain

Since it began in 1987, the ICAIL conference has been established as the foremost international conference addressing research in Artificial Intelligence and Law. It is organized biennially under the auspices of the International Association for Artificial Intelligence and Law (IAAIL), and in cooperation with the Association for the Advancement of Artificial Intelligence (AAAI). The conference proceedings are published by ACM. The journal Artificial Intelligence and Law regularly publishes expanded versions of selected ICAIL papers.

Important Dates

Deadline for submission of abstracts (optional): January 9, 2015

Deadline for submission of papers: January 16, 2015 (this deadline is hard)

Deadline for submission of demonstration abstracts: January 23, 2015

Notification of acceptance: March 13, 2015

Deadline for submission of doctoral consortium papers: March 31, 2015

Deadline for final revised and formatted papers: April 17, 2015

Conference: June 8 – June 12, 2015

Topics

The field serves as an excellent setting for AI researchers to demonstrate the application of their work in a rich, real-world domain. The conference also serves as a venue for researchers to showcase their work on the theoretical foundations of computational models of law. Accordingly, authors are invited to submit papers on a broad spectrum of research topics that include, but are not restricted to:

Formal and computational models of legal reasoning, including argumentation, evidential reasoning, and decision making

ICAIL is keen to broaden its scope to include topics of growing importance in artificial intelligence research. Therefore, papers are invited in the following featured categories:

eDiscovery and eDisclosure

Open data, linked data, and big data

Machine learning

Argument mining

Papers will be assessed in a rigorous reviewing procedure. Standard assessment criteria for research papers will apply to all submissions (relevance, originality, significance, technical quality, evaluation, presentation). Papers proposing formal or computational models should provide examples and/or simulations that show the models’ applicability to a realistic legal problem or domain. Papers on applications should describe clearly the underlying motivations, the techniques employed, and the current state of both implementation and evaluation. All papers should make clear their relation to prior work.

Demonstrations

A session will be organized for the demonstration of creative, robust, and practical working applications and tools. Where a demonstration is not connected to a submitted paper, a two-page extended abstract about the system should be submitted for review, via the conference support system and following the conference style, by the demo submission deadline of January 23, 2015. Accepted extended abstracts will be published in the conference proceedings. For those demonstrations that are connected to a paper in the main track, no separate statement about the demonstration need be submitted, but the author(s) should send an email to the Program Chair by the demo submission deadline to register their interest in demonstrating their work at this session.

Continuing Legal Education Sessions

In addition to the workshops and tutorials solicited above, ICAIL 2015 will feature two continuing legal education (CLE) sessions as follows:

Friday, June 12

Software, automation and machine learning in IP law (morning)

Trends in legal software and search engines (afternoon)

The CLE sessions will also feature an “exhibit hall” for vendors and law firms. Interested parties should email Ted Sichelman, Conference Chair (tsichelman@sandiego.edu) for more information.

A Doctoral Consortium will be held as part of ICAIL 2015. The event will provide doctoral students with an opportunity to publish and present papers on their PhD research and to receive feedback and encouragement from the AI and Law community. Students who submit papers to the main conference are also welcome to submit their work to the Doctoral Consortium. A call for papers specifically for the Doctoral Consortium will be forthcoming. Further details will be provided at the conference website: http://www.icail2015.org

Submission Details, including instructions for blind review

Papers should not exceed 10 pages in the approved style. Style format template files can be found at http://www.acm.org/sigs/pubs/proceed/template.html. While papers can be prepared using LaTeX or Word, all papers should be converted to PDF prior to submission. All papers must be submitted electronically to the conference support system, https://www.conftool.net/icail2015/ by the paper submission deadline. To aid the reviewing process, authors are requested to submit abstracts of their papers by the above abstract submission deadline. Abstract submissions should include the paper title, up to four keywords, and a contact address for the corresponding author. Both papers and abstracts should be submitted electronically to the conference support system.

Reviewing for ICAIL 2015 will be double blind. The first page of each submitted paper should include the title of the paper and the ID number of the paper as allocated when the paper is registered on the conference support system. Papers submitted for review should not include names and affiliations of the authors, nor an acknowledgements section. These aspects can be added at the camera-ready stage. The references should include all published literature relevant to the paper, including previous works of the authors, though care should be taken in the style of writing in order to preserve anonymity.

Authors will be notified of the acceptance decision by the date indicated above. Papers not accepted for full publication and presentation may be accepted as short research abstracts. Papers (including research abstracts) must be presented at the conference in order to appear in the proceedings (and, moreover, all papers and abstracts presented at the conference will appear in the proceedings, which will be published by ACM). Final versions of papers for publication in the proceedings will be due by the date indicated above.

Donald H. Berman Award for Best Student Paper

IAAIL has established a best student paper award in memory of Donald H. Berman, a Professor of Law at Northeastern University who was a co-founder of the AI and Law journal. The award consists of a cash gift and free attendance at ICAIL 2015. For a paper to be considered for the award, the student author(s) should be clearly designated as such when the paper is submitted, and any non-student co-authors should provide a statement by email to the Program Chair that affirms that the paper is primarily student work. Notification will be made through the ICAIL website, and the award will be presented at the conference banquet.

Peter Jackson Award for Best Innovative Application Paper

At ICAIL 2015 a new award is being introduced for the best innovative application paper. The award is in honor of Peter Jackson, Thomson Reuters’ Chief Research Scientist, who was a strong supporter of the ICAIL conferences and a significant contributor to the development of advanced technologies in AI and Law. The award will consist of a special commemorative plaque and recognition on the conference and IAAIL websites. For a paper to be considered for the award, the author(s) should clearly identify it as an application paper by including “innovative applications” as a keyword. Notification will be made through the ICAIL website, and the award will be presented at the conference banquet.

Local Committee:
Richard Belew, University of California, San Diego
Karl Gruben, University of San Diego School of Law
Dan Katz, Michigan State University College of Law
Ted Sichelman, University of San Diego School of Law
Thomas Smith, University of San Diego School of Law
Roland Vogl, Stanford Law School